André Alexis - A

Baddeley began to understand what it was that had driven Avery Andrews to live away from the world. How had Andrews managed to spend so many years — so many decades — with the astounding visions and the inescapable solitude?

In fact, he came to appreciate Andrews’ plight even more deeply in the year that followed. Home is the Parakeet was published, an event that should have brought him joy. In his previous life — that is, in his life before Avery Andrews — he’d imagined the moments of publication (the launch, the pleasure of meeting other writers, the admiration of strangers) as pure joy. But the launch of Parakeet was nothing like pleasure. It was dull and insignificant. It took place in a room filled with people he did not know, who did not know him. The food on offer was tasteless; his own nerves dulled the acuity of his senses. And beyond all that there was a feeling of fraudulence. He had not written the novel. He did not like novels. The thing had been given to him by a being whose only interest was in the supposed peace the invasion of Baddeley’s psyche brought to it. A more hollow event than a book launch Baddeley could not imagine.

That is, he could not imagine anything more hollow until reviewers — and, to an extent, the public — decided they liked his book very much. Home is the Parakeet was, for the most part, warmly received. Baddeley had not been known as a novelist, so there were envious critics who would have preferred to knock him down a notch. But none could do so without ignoring the flagrant fact that something interesting was up with the novel. Yes, of course, a handful of reviewers stared down their own doubts, in order to deliver to the public a disdain they assumed, as Baddeley had once assumed, was what the public needed most. But few listened to them, save for readers who did not like novels in any case. Outdoing its publisher’s expectations, Parakeet was what is called a bestseller. It was bought in great numbers and read by almost half of those who bought it.

This success, which meant nothing to Baddeley, was followed by a handful of surreal events that meant even less. He spoke to a thin, freckle-faced man on Radio One . On Radio Two he spoke to a stocky man with a Vandyke. And then he was invited to read at the “Festival of Authors,” the invitation extended by the festival’s artistic director who also invited Baddeley to a reception for a handful of writers who were at the festival that year.

The reception took place at a Korean restaurant on Bloor called Fennel and Rue . Its second floor is where food was served, but its first floor — a few steps down from street-level — was a tea house. To one side of the entrance was a barrel filled with rotting cabbage for kimchee. The tea house itself was predominantly wood — exposed beams, dark brown slats, knots and whorls like maddened veins. It was the kind of room that made you think of splinters until you actually touched the wood of the tables and benches and could feel them, smooth as polished stones. On offer in the tea house was tea: a varied and sometimes unexpected selection of flavours — grapefruit and cranberry; cranberry and walnut; orange and vanilla, etc. — served without any of the ritualistic fervour that sometimes poisoned tea houses.

Had he been alone, Baddeley would almost certainly have been comforted by the elegance of the room. But he was not alone. Little by little, the room filled with those for whom the reception was meant: writers, publishers, editors, and their various consorts. All were polite and all of them seemed kind. He should not have felt the least anxiety, but Baddeley was anxious from the beginning. He simply could not understand the connection between what he had gone through to write Parakeet and this bustle. He was conscious of how little he deserved to be in this place with these people. It seemed to him that everyone else — from the waitresses to the well-known — had better cause than he did to drink tea and eat the anise- flavoured biscuits that were passed around on silver platters.

Baddeley spoke briefly with a writer from the uK. And insulted him (or seemed to, though he hadn’t meant any offense). He spoke even more briefly with an American writer, and seemed to insult him too. In any case, neither of his contemporaries had anything much to say and abandoned him, after politely smiling and turning away. So it was with almost everyone at the reception, even those who approached him first. The only exception was the slightly unwashed André Alexis, a writer whose work Baddeley despised. Alexis would not stop talking until Baddeley himself nodded politely and turned away, waving a hand in the air as if to signal to someone he’d seen on the other side of the room, though there was of course no one.

It occurred to Baddeley, as he turned away from Alexis, that it was possible — that it was perhaps true — that all the writers in the room felt as awkward and fraudulent as he did, that all of them were as unfit for society as he was. He dismissed this thought almost immediately, however. On the evidence, it could not be true that they all felt as he did, because the one thing his contemporaries did most consistently was to congregate at these dinners and launches, celebrations and memorials. Some of them, somewhere, had to be having something like fun. It was perverse to think otherwise.

The reception was, in a word, a damp squib. But the dinner upstairs was worse. The restaurant was not unappealing. It was high ceilinged, the walls above the white wainscoting a light blue. Framed and hanging on the walls were variously patterned, full- sized kimonos; perhaps a dozen of them in all. Tables of all sizes were distributed about the room. Half of the restaurant was reserved for the literary gathering. There were cards at the tables (white cards on which, in silvery, cursive script, names were printed) to indicate where one was supposed to sit. Someone had made a mistake, however, because when he found the card with his name, Baddeley saw that Gil Davidoff’s card was at the place beside his. He was about to discreetly exchange his own card with that at another table when Gil himself appeared.

— Hey! said Davidoff. Where you been, Badds?

Davidoff was in his tenue de chasse : black jeans, a green, crewnecked sweater, a loose-fitting jacket with tweed patches at its elbows. He had new glasses: thick tortoise shelled rims, rectangular frames. His brown hair was boyishly dishevelled, as if he’d just stepped from bed, thrown a few things on and come to the reception at the pleading behest of the reception’s organizers. Perhaps instinctively, Davidoff turned to look about the room thus affording Baddeley a view of what had been, at some point, a vaguely Keatsian profile but which was now a ruined, patrician vista: broken nose, protruding chin, gapped front teeth, greying hair, the face of a blowsy concierge.

— I didn’t know you had a novel in you, Davidoff continued. I even heard it was okay. But you should be writing non-fiction. That’s the thing these days. I’m writing about all the great television I’m making my son watch.

— That sounds interesting, said Baddeley.

— Plus chicks love it when you’re an authority on something, said Davidoff.

Then, pausing for effect and turning to allow Baddeley a view of his hazel eyes, Davidoff said

— I don’t know what I did to make you go all silent, Alexander, but I bet you miss me even more than I miss you, eh?

To Baddeley’s knowledge, this was as close to an apology as Davidoff had ever come: a vague allusion to a vexing incident in which he may have played some part or other, though what that part was, exactly, Davidoff himself did not know.